Sub-headline: French president risks undermining his programme for economic reform at home

That ‘economic reform’ of France was even the subject of Mr. Bret Stephens’ May 5, 2017 essay, he being the latest addition to the Neo-Conservative coven at the New York Times, is worth a reading. The intellectual habit of mind of the Neo-Con is premature triumphalism.

Mr. Sandbu elides from his essay Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’, but simply hints at his hubristic political model, and that the reforms of French Labor Laws must not be abandoned, in the interest of his grand designs for a re-invigorated EU, under the leadership of a Macron/Merkel/Schäuble troika. Is Macron the natural inheritor of the European Federalism of the unelected Technocrats of Jean Monnet? Allied to the delusional Grand Politics of De Gaulle?

Mr. Sandbu shouts ‘Stop’ to the limping Macon Neo-Liberal juggernaut, called en Marche. Mr. Sandbu as dramaturge, makes the central conflict of his melodrama, that between domestic labor law reform, as an integral part of Macron’s ‘Jupertarian’ delusions, and the equally dubious project of the re-invigoration of the EU Cartel, which is, prima facae, undemocratic to its core. Neo-Liberalism is not, nor has it even been interested in Republicanism, nor the thriving of Democratic Institutions. Its obsession, with the temperature taking of the God of the Market, makes it the arch-enemy of those Republican/Democratic institutions and their traditions, no matter how imperfectly realized! That God of the Market collapsed in 2008,as did its companion deity The Self-Correcting Market: due to its wholesale thievery. Both are still on the critical list, except to its legion of nurses, like Mr. Sandbu, who acts as apologists for the twin failures, and use the possibility of a full recovery of their patients, as the cornerstone to their agitprop.

Take these paragraphs of Mr. Sandbu essay:

On the domestic level, Mr Macron has shown an uncanny ability to overcome the perceived trade-off between efficiency and solidarity that has bedevilled French economic policymaking. He recognises — and more importantly, clearly communicates — that limbering up the economy can make it more, not less, protective of ordinary people.

Hence his moves as economy minister to tear down regulatory barriers that cushion insiders, but relegate ever more people to an outsider status of precarious work or no work at all. Hence, too, the scaling up of labour market deregulation slated as the top priority for Mr Macron’s first year as president.

The plans are right, the will seems strong, and if he and his government obtain the reforms they want, the economic rewards will be significant — and France’s influence in Europe and the world will be enhanced as a result.

The ‘limbering up of the economy’ is the clumsy euphemism for its Neo-Liberlization and the use of the word ‘bedevilled’ is another euphemism for the fact that Mitterrand’s surrender to the Dark Side, the embrace of the Free Market Dogma, was just a baby step. What is really needed is the total emancipation of France’s from the thrall of Socialism! The key to success for Macron’s ‘Jupertarian Politics’ is predicated on internal Neo-Liberal Reform.

What Mr. Sandbu leaves out of his carefully massaged propaganda is that Macron was elected with an almost 38% rate of spoiled ballots , white ballots and abstentions, not to mention his political status as ‘the lesser of two evils’.

What follows is a description of ‘Macron’s Folly’ in melodramatic terms. Macron must ‘reform‘ France before all else. Mr. Sandbu last two sentences are instructive of what might just be dubbed ‘The Macron Neo-Liberal Imperative’

Mr Macron must not put his domestic reforms at risk of being weakened by his European initiatives.

An economically thriving France will be strong in Europe, fiscal discipline or not. But a domestic economic promise undermined by a European distraction will make France fail both at home and abroad.